160 A CALIFORNIA TRAMP. 



river, we stood on the edge of a "jornado" near sixty miles in 

 width. Filling our water casks, we left the gloomy valley of 

 the Rio de los Angeles (river of the angels), and ascending a 

 broad, square canon, nine miles in length, and strewn with the 

 debris of a disruptured world, we reached an uneven desert 

 plateau, where, from all parts of the compass, the most awful 

 desolation stared us in the face. Those in the "States," who 

 imagine the whole of our western territory to be one vast tract 

 of towering forests and verdant prairies, could hardly be 

 brought to realize the fact, that within the limits of our Re- 

 public are regions of such frightful desolation as these. They 

 read of the sterile, waterless plains covered with beds of mov- 

 ing sands and shattered rocks, which lie spread in desolate 

 grandeur over the Old World, little thinking of the vast ex- 

 panse of similar desert region that mars the beauty of our 

 country. Doomed forever to remain as it is, the abiding place 

 of those who only in form can lay claim to belong to the 

 human family, and of loathsome reptiles, deadly in their sting, 

 its wildness can never be subdued. Desolation sits enthroned 

 on those cheerless domains, and with a ghastly smile surveys 

 her awful realm, populated w^ith hosts of distorted specimens of 

 the animal and vegetable kingdom ! 



From the time I left the prairies of Nebraska my narra- 

 tive has contained so many abusive adjectives in reference to 

 the country traversed, so much disparagement of its soil, rocks, 

 water and vegetation, that I fear the reader will think it owed 

 me something it would not pay, and that I was taking a means 

 to slander it wherein it could not talk back. But my lan- 

 guage has been none too strong. The blight on part of the 

 land may have been caused by an exceptional drought; but the 

 desolation was mainly normal; so I will let these adjectives re- 

 main propped up against their relative nouns, at the risk of bear- 

 ing them over with too much support. I may have been seem- 

 ingly too harsh also in my reference to my brother teamsters, the 



